Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland

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  1. See alsoRutebeuf,“De Brichemer,”who invokes mythic distance, reproach-
    fully telling a patron that he will have to wait as long for payment as the Britons
    for King Arthur’s return from Avalon ( 15 – 16 ).

  2. John Bossy,Christianity in the West 1400 – 1700 (Oxford, 1985 ), 57. Cf.
    Rutebeuf:“Du duel son voisin ne li membre / Més le sien pleure”[“He forgets
    his neighbour’s sorrow, but weeps for his own”]. The speaker is the impov-
    erished, dice-obsessed“I”of“La griesche d’yver,” 83 – 84.

  3. Burrow,Medieval Writers, 43. Cf. another notable instance of the court
    servitor’s symptomatology, the more loquacious Deschamps’s toothache
    (“Mal de teste telle doleur ne fait,” 5 ,iv, 9 ).

  4. Gedichte, no. 3 (“Omnia tempus habent”), 18 – 20.

  5. SeeMachaut,i, Complaintevii(“Sire, à vous fais ceste clamour”), 23 – 26 ;FD,
    ii,xliv( 806 – 07 ), 2 ( 806 ).
    44 .Crétin,xlv, 39 – 43 , 32 – 33. Perhaps the nearest analogue to the petitioner’s
    diseased and tortured body can be detected in medieval religious lyrics on the
    body isolated before death, in which, as Douglas Gray observes,“a fundamen-
    tal materialism seems to assert itself through layers of penitential comment”
    ( 183 ). On poems that describe the body in decay, and theProprietates Mortisor
    “Signs of Death,”see Douglas Gray,Themes and Images in the Medieval English
    Religious Lyric (London: 1972 ), 190 – 199 ; Rosemary Woolf, The English
    Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages(Oxford, 1968 ), 94 – 95 , 317 – 18.
    45 .“Male Regle,” 409.
    46 .M-S G,“Tanto viro locuturi”(st. 10 , 5 – 6 ).
    47 .Deschamps, 4 ,dccxcvii, 1 – 10.

  6. “Lydgate’s Letter to Gloucester,”Minor Poems of John Lydgate,ii, 6 – 8 , 13 – 15 ,
    18 , 20. For an especially telling reading of the body’s“subjection to theflows of
    monetary representation, and...its concomitant disappearance into semiotic
    flux,”see D. Vance Smith,“Body Doubles: Producing the MasculineCorpus,”
    Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie
    Wheeler (New York, 2000 ), 5 – 19 ( 9 ).

  7. Regement, 684 – 85.
    50 .Deschamps, 5 ,dccclvii, 8. Cf. Deschamps, 4 ,dccxcvii, 9 ;dccxciv, 13.

  8. Similarly, Reiss,Dunbar, 42 ; Scott,Dunbar, 94.

  9. Bawcutt,Dunbar, 111.
    53 .FD, 2 ,xxxv, 778 , 13 – 18.
    54 .FD, 2 ,xxxv, 778 , 8 – 10.

  10. Jacqueline Cerquiglini,“Un engin si soutil”: Guillaume de Machaut et l’écriture
    auxivesiècle(Geneva, 1985 ), 143 – 47.

  11. I follow here Cerquiglini,“‘Le clerc et le louche,’” 482.

  12. Bawcutt, “Dunbar’s Christmas Carol,” Scottish Language and Literature,
    Medieval and Renaissance: Fourth International Conference 1984 , Proceedings,
    ed. Dietrich Strauss and Horst W. Drescher (Frankfurt, 1986 ), 381 – 92.

  13. D. A. Miller,The Novel and the Police(Berkeley, CA, 1988 ), 208.

  14. Cf. Deschamps’s transmutation into a“vieil roncin”(old nag) through age:
    Deschamps, 5 , xc, 10. Slightly later, Marot compares himself to a sheep


198 Notes to Pages 72 – 76

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